Virtual Worlds News picked up today’s announcement that Millions of Us is leading an industry coalition working with Forrester Consulting to help deliver standardized - and more in-depth - metrics for virtual worlds marketing campaigns. They key issue is moving away from simplistic eyeball counts towards a measure of engagement quality.

“The basic idea is that we’ve organized a consortium of the major virtual world platforms, about 10 of them so far, who are all participating in a study by Forrester,” Millions of Us CEO Reuben Steiger told Virtual Worlds News. “We’ve come out of the experimental phase of marketing in virtual worlds. Consequently, what we’re seeing as an agency for large brands is that they’re now committing non-experimental budgets. When they understand that this is a standalone category with 100 million people globally, they have a lot of trouble making sense of what to make sense.”